Plants are essential to creating an enjoyable garden. They offer colour, texture, fragrance and more. You will love and enjoy your garden as a place to, relax, entertain and share with family and friends and to treat your garden as an extension of your home using these design and landscaping solutions to bring your garden to life. “The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses”-Hanna Rion. This simple but powerful observation perfectly embodies the true nature of gardening.

Pick Power Plants
When selecting plants for your landscape make sure one-third of the plants are evergreen. Include plants to support wildlife. Use plants with low needs (water, maintenance, fertilizer)…in triads- choose one for colour, a second to punctuate and a third to blur the edges. Use plants with fragrance, movement and tactility to feed your sense.

Keep Plants Simple
If you want a garden to enjoy with less, maintenance, pick a few plants, make sure they are happy growing there, and allow them to grow. Learn the ability to edit and also grow well. Chosen native plants because they require less traditional maintenance such as pruning, fertilizing and watering.

Repeat Plants, Colours and Shapes
The repetition of key plants, shapes or colour provides a sense of calm and visual unity. Select plants that meet the following criteria: have long season don’t look untidy after flowering, flourish in your garden’s conditions. But don’t overdo it; limit the number of different shapes and colors. It is difficult not to take in too much variety.

Contrast and Balance Plantings
Plants can be the ultimate delight of a garden. Make sure there is a balance of fine and bold, dark and light, soft and hard. The contrasts enliven a garden and provides balance that we all can sense and enjoy.

Foliage
Don’t forget the foliage. Emphasize greenery throughout the garden. There are many different textures, colours and foliage’s sizes and the flowers are often the accents you could for instance, the large trees mixed with texture rich bromeliads and ferns

Mass It
No matter what size you are planting you need masses of things you may have five or six species of plants and use maybe 10 of one, 20 of another and 100 of the smaller groundcovers. Mass unifies textual, heavily planted garden.

Use The Power Of Colour
A landscape, awash with colour catches our eyes; sends visual cues to birds, insects and animals and affects us all with intensity and contrast. The entire world reacts to the language of color. Color brings your personality to the garden and is one of the primary factors in how a garden feels. Use colours you personally like in your garden. Of course, the personal meaning you find in any hue may be different. Used your taste above all. Once you have settled on your favorite color, use these tips from the experts:

Play With Color Tones– the same form repeated with subtle difference makes impact without dominating.Exploits Opposites – complimentary colors create juxtaposition that is fresh and lively.

Create Drama And Interest-in your garden by planting spots of your favorite color. The recurring color will draw the eye through the landscape and give your landscape a cohesive tapestry.

Borrow From Some Colorful Cultural Associations
Red is the color of excitement and power. Orange radiates fun.

Yellow is the happy color.
Green is the color of peace and renewal and is the most restful color to the eye. Blue lends depth and stability. Purple connotes higher wisdom and is associated with originality.
White is pure color of light and serenity .

Can You Have Too Much Color?
Color can be tricky. Some way not to overdo it: repeating colors in flowers and foliage is a good way to prevent chaos. Sticking to a few similar hues creates a feeling of harmony, you can’t have everything screaming at you in the garden. A palette of green plants gives the eyes a chance to rest, separate areas with intense color or high drama (think large bold, multi colored foliage with neutrals). There is often a visible calmness when people are in these restful spaces.